Mad MoneyReview

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Save your money so you don't get mad that you spent it on this.

By Todd Gilchrist

If one asked them, the bigwigs behind Hollywood's golden gates might argue that their January and February offerings were merely family-friendly rejoinders to the Oscar fare that drained audiences of emotion, or worse yet -- gasp! -- made them have to think. They would probably suggest that movies like those released in the early months of previous years, such as Code Name: The Cleaner, When A Stranger Calls, Grandma's Boy and Son of the Mask are in fact part of a calculated and intentional attempt by studios to satisfy the public demand for populist fare at its broadest possible level, after wasting the fall months appealing to snobby critics and awards-group voters. Matters of intelligence are for nerds, they would dismissively chuckle; we're here to entertain.

The unfortunate truth, however, is that the studios are merely desperate to get rid of their crappiest movies, and want the fewest possible people to be aware they made them. Executives know this, the filmmakers who created them know this, and critics definitely know this. Thus far this year we've already been treated to One Missed Call, First Sunday, and In the Name of the King (whose director, Uwe Boll, qualifies as an iconic dump-month filmmaker), and have yet to look forward to Untraceable, Over Her Dead Body, and The Hottie & the Nottie. These are not films that anyone wants to see -- not critics, not audiences, and certainly not executives -- because they remind them of considerable investments that will somewhat obviously not pay off.

Beyond all rational expectation for mediocrity, then, comes Mad Money, a film of such stultifying, aggressive awfulness that it inspires retaliation -- first against yourself for choosing to see it and then against those studio executives who thought this piece of garbage was worth releasing at all. A film so bad that it makes me long for the subtlety, nuance and intelligence of Rob Zombie's Halloween, Mad Money is an early front-runner for worst film of the year and a deafening argument for audiences staying away in droves -- until March, at the very least.

Diane Keaton, once an actress whom I enjoyed watching on screen in films like Annie Hall and The Godfather, plays Bridget Cardigan, an upper-middle class mom who accepts a job as a janitor at the Federal Reserve after her husband Don (Ted Danson) is downsized from his job. Dissatisfied by the low pay and dehumanizing conditions -- but not of course enough to move into a home smaller than the guest wing of the Playboy Mansion -- Bridget decides that she will steal money from the feds, who regularly destroy old and outdated cash. Enlisting a single mother named Nina (Queen Latifah) and a free-spirited cart jockey named Jackie (Katie Holmes), Bridget puts her plan in motion, effectively spiriting away hundreds of thousands of dollars right under the nose of the federal government.

By now those of you who still read my reviews without rage or disgust presumably recognize that I generally welcome escapist entertainment, as long as it's well done or maybe just entertaining. (Hell, I loved Dragon Wars.) But borrowing a line from David Lynch's adaptation of Frank Herbert's science-fiction novel Dune, and to a lesser extent from The Manchurian Candidate, for this journalist Mad Money is the killing word. No moviegoing experience in recent memory has made me more uncomfortable or angry than this one, and I saw Dungeon Siege four days earlier for God's sake. The closest agony to which this relates is probably the aforementioned Halloween screening, which happened in September of 2007 and in retrospect seems more desirable because at least cast members died. Most baffling is the fact that other members of the preview audience were actually laughing -- which was troubling because it didn't seem like Keaton and Co. were even trying to be funny, much actually accomplishing that elusive goal.

Despite boasting four credited screenwriters (and a director in Callie Khouri, the patron saint of contemporary female-centric films thanks to her script for Thelma & Louise), not one of the characters in Mad Money is remotely complicated, interesting or even coherently drawn. Keaton's Bridget is a comparative literature graduate, a housewife and the mother of two adult-age children. What makes her the Danny Ocean of the suburban set? If one of those elements were emphasized even slightly -- if perhaps she coordinated her clothes, house and kids with the meticulousness of Annette Bening's character in American Beauty -- then we might at least believe that she could discover this foolproof method of ripping off the government. Instead, Bridget comes off as a spoiled, talentless housewife who inherits a criminal plot from a screenwriter and rides it all the way to the bank.